Posts Tagged ‘site news’

Welcome to the New Year.

It’s been several months since either Ethan or I have posted here and the dust bunnies have started to overrun the place. When I first started the Baton Rougean, I had every intention of turning it into a major publication in our area. To me, a venue for hyperlocal news controlled by Baton Rougeans was something that we needed. And Ethan, who believed that we needed a comic focused on our community, brought us the wonderful BTR Toons. We worked really hard and had marginal success. I don’t mean to debase our success, because we really broke through to a fair amount of locals who became very loyal. And for that we’re extremely grateful.

And to those, I guess some sort of an explanation is in order. While I’d love to elaborate on some epic tale of where I’ve been for the last few months, the truth is actually quite mundane. Specifically: life. We both became busy in the final months of 2009. Ethan was recovering from a rough year and I was deep in my third semester of an engineering major, which to say the least isn’t exactly a walk in the park. It’s unfortunate, but c’est la vie, right?

But it’s a whole new year, and so we can look past any previous transgressions and towards another year replete with a local’s perspective of news, analysis, commentary, dining reviews, community features and of course the wonderful BTR Toons.

As we prepare for this year, it is my hope that we’ll be able to get the Baton Rougean into a loftier place in Baton Rouge news and become a more popular choice for local news consumption. I’d also like to increase community interaction (and sponsorships!) and maybe add a few members to the staff.

We invite you to join us in our endeavor and wish you a happy and well 2010!

Sunday is Father’s day, and if you haven’t gotten yours a gift yet, then let the Baton Rougean help you out. We’re now accepting nominations for Father of the Year. To nominate yours, just send us a quick email with his name, your name, a picture, a short blurb about why he’s awesome and some hilarious and/or embarrassing story that’d be funny for others to read on the site. We’ll write up a short post commemorating your father, so you’ll look like a fantastic son or daughter and we’ll have something to post on Sunday (because, you know, I’ll be too busy with my father to scrape up news for you). Submissions accepted through tomorrow afternoon, so get them in ASAP!

I just set up the Baton Rougean on Facebook. You can add us by visiting our profile.

Also, there has been basically nothing interesting that has happened in the past few days. What’s up Baton Rouge?

Sidenote: Bobby Jindal turned 38 yesterday, so wish him our governor a happy birthday.

Today I had the opportunity to meet some of my readers as I handed out the prizes to the winners of our JazzyBird Coffee contest. It was really cool putting names to the faces of some of the numbers I see coming in every day. Everyone Iet was very cordial, bordering on some level of personal acquaintance and it was really, really cool. Moreover, everyone was very supportive of my efforts, and that’s the sort of encouragement I need to keep trucking along. Thanks again everyone; you reaffirmed a suspicion I’ve had all along: our readers are awesome.

As always, you can always send me an email with any tips, news, questions or lovely, mindless banter. There’s a real person behind all this excellent journalism. Just hit me up on Twitter or email me.

The contest to win some JazzyBird Coffee product, sponsored by that startup that we covered a little over a week ago, has come to a close. Congratulations to the following on winning the contest:

• Chase Swindler
• Ashton Melancon
• John S.
• Becky F.
• Jeremy Bunner
• Lirahs

Contact me at logan@batonrougean.com for more details on how to claim your prize. And stay tuned as we bring you more local news and contests.

Logan actually did this the other night in a Halo match. Also, I don't ever want to draw a Mongoose again.

Please provide a link back to this post and to EthanKillett.com when referring to this strip.

By the way, we play Halo pretty often, so if you’re ever on, his us up. Gamertags: Logan—ustopablefury; Ethan—WALLY WAFFLE.

Yesterday, I was talking to my friend Richard Felix about miscellaneous geekery. During our chat, he informed me that he always mistypes our url (which is batonrougean.com) as thebatonrougean.com. Which, of course, is the formal name of this blog. As a simple oversight on my part, I had never even considered that this would be a problem. However, starting today you can access this site in its full glory via both urls. Our primary domain will stay at batonrougean.com and we request that you link to it as well. I hope this will alleviate any confusion.

I’m pleased to announced a new feature on the Baton Rougean. It’s our weather feed and it’s on Twitter. You can follow us @btrweather for the latest Baton Rouge forecast, updated every night. You can also select to subscribe to the feed via RSS or via text message on Twitter to keep updated on-the-go. This is coming to you live from our Weather Center. Additionally, we’ll bring you breaking emergency weather updates from the same feed. This feed updates with only weather-related information and will receive an average of one update per day. You can subscribe to our regular Twitter feed, which covers Baton Rouge news, @btrblog.

We’ve been posting a few reviews recently, so I thought I’d take the time and explain the calculus that’s been employed thus far.

Whenever I go to a restaurant, I go to eat, not to review, and so my primary focus is entertaining an enjoyable meal—both in food and company. Moreover, the Baton Rougean isn’t yet well known and so I don’t have any claim to fame, so when I show up in a restaurant, people don’t really know who I am. I think this works well because it means that I get no special treatment; the assumption is that I’m getting the same treatment and level of service that anyone else would get.

I write the reviews anywhere between 15 minutes to six hours after I’ve had the meal, but I never wait beyond a day. This is important because I need to get the review out before my brain compresses the memory in my sleep. (This is slightly disingenuous to how it works, but this isn’t a science journal. Just know that there’s more to it than that.) I also talk about the experience with whomever was in my party (usually my family) to ensure that my treatment isn’t unique.
Continue reading “Reviewing Metrics” →

Welcome to the Baton Rougean. My name is Logan Leger and I’m the editor-in-chief and a native Baton Rougean. the Baton Rougean is a new media news venue for Baton Rouge—i.e., a blog. It’s published by the media arm of NewAperio, an internet startup founded here in Baton Rouge. It was conceived and developed and is written, edited and maintained exclusively by Baton Rougeans: the site and all its contents are authentically Baton Rougean.

The concept came to me when I was reading news online. There are a number of good news outlets for Baton Rouge, but all are formal new outlets—e.g. WAFB, WBRZ, the Advocate, et al. None of them were written in the vernacular (all were written in a journalistic tone), none of them was written from a citizen’s perspective and a lot of their content was aggregated from a global news conglomerate. I wanted something different for Baton Rouge, so I started the Baton Rougean.

Louisiana and Baton Rouge specifically are different kinds of locales. We’re culturally diverse and have a rich history, and this continues today. Baton Rouge is a lively city with many great events and a wonderful urban scene, yet it’s still small enough to create a homey atmosphere. This is the other purpose of the Baton Rougean: to share a little bit of our home with the rest of the world.

Beginning today, you’ll have a virtual space to come and read up on the latest happenings around town. Our authors will begin to fill this page with all sorts of wonderful Baton Rouge content. I invite you to get involved as well. You can subscribe to our news via our news feed or email. You can even contribute via Flickr or Twitter. We also take tips for news via email or Twitter and anyone can submit articles for inclusion in our site. If you would like information on advertising, just get in touch.

From all of us, we hope you enjoy the Baton Rougean.